Hungarian geometry in the Summer of 1981

No, I never solved it by peeling off the stickers or disassembling the device.

No, I couldn’t solve one of them today if my life depended on it.

My personal best time for solving it? I think it was two minutes or less. Maybe 90 seconds if the parts spun freely.

Yep. In the summer of 1981, I discovered the wonders of the Rubik’s Cube.

At the time, I was a pre-freshman at Hamilton College, as part of a five-week higher-education opportunity program that allowed students from the inner cities an opportunity to learn and achieve prior to the commencement of their freshman years. We lived on campus, we took classes, and we also went on field trips – all to simulate the college experience and what pressures and distractions we would face in our four years there.

One of my classmates – I can’t remember which one – had a Rubik’s Cube in his dorm. I could tell he had tried to solve it – “tried” being a figurative term – and was happy only that he had achieved the arrangement of one solid row of colors along one of the cube’s sides. Other than that, he was a few seconds away from popping the toy open with a screwdriver and re-positioning the pieces manually.

I tried spinning the cube’s axes back and forth. It was intriguing.

“Don’t do that, Chuck,” he reprimanded, taking the device away. “I’m going to solve it one of these days. I’ll get it.”

A few days later, while visiting a bookstore in downtown Clinton – the city at the bottom of the hill from Hamilton College – I came across a very intriguing booklet. “How To Solve Rubik’s Cube,” I think was the title. $2 later, the booklet was mine.

In reading the book, I learned about the toy – how it was designed in the early 1970’s by a Hungarian mathematician named Erno Rubik in an attempt to teach and understand three-dimensional geometry. And in reading the book, I had the same technological epiphany as I did years later upon discovering Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I instantly learned –

The cube’s center squares never moved. You built the completed sides off of those colors.

You start at the top, and you work down layer by layer. There’s a series of mechanical patterns of twists and rotations that will realign all the squares from the top to the middle, and then to the bottom.

As you move colors to one spot, you’re moving colors to another spot as a placeholder.

Standard Rubik’s Cubes are stiff and clunky; but a few drops of oil will make those axes spin like wheels.

And sure enough, a few days later, my college buddy came out of his dorm, asking, “Okay, who’s the one who solved my Rubik’s Cube?”

Hand raised.

In all honesty, solving that Rubik’s Cube turned into a heck of an icebreaker. One of my classmates actually used my cube-solving skills as part of her public speaking class assignment – she would describe the techniques used to solve the cube, while I stood alongside her and spun that thing like a safecracker opening a bank vault.

I had that Rubik’s Cube for most of my freshman year, but after a while I lost interest in the toy. Because, as far as I was concerned, I only knew it as a toy. I didn’t really grasp that it was supposed to be a tool to teach three-dimensional geographic concepts. I just equated it with a way for this nervous, socially inept kid to break the ice with his higher-status classmates.

Thirty years later, I barely remember the patterns and techniques that could turn a scrambled cube into a perfect six-sided color-corrected completion. I suppose if I found that book again, and re-read it – it’s probably on Amazon or something – and if I got my mitts on a vintage Rubik’s Cube today – then maybe I could solve the toy again.

Maybe I didn’t need to view the cube as three-dimensional geography. Maybe there was a more symbolic meaning to the toy. I could solve the puzzle – while at the same time, I could solve portions of my social ineptness, my nervousness, my “hey I’m an okay person even though there are days when I feel as out-of-place as a third baseman on the Boston Celtics” – by doing something that other people could not. By showing a tiny little skill that could, at one point in time or another, open a door that I thought might always stay closed. Confidence where none previously existed.

Maybe that was the three-dimensional spatial geometry lesson I needed after all.

Chuck Miller

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Chuck Miller: Writer, Photographer, and the life lessons I learned from Street Academy